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Gallup Poll Shows Democrats Re-Gaining the Lead in Party Affiliation

January 9, 2013

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Now 47 Percent Identify as Democrats or Lean That Way, While Only 42 Percent Identify as Republican or Lean That Way –

By Glynn Wilson –

It appears that the centrist course set by President Barack Obama in office and in the presidential campaign of 2012, and the decline of the radical tea party, are beginning to make a difference in public opinion. While the latest Gallup poll on party identification still has more Americans saying they are independents than either Republicans or Democrats, the first story out on the subject in 2013 reveals an uptick in independents who lean toward the Democratic Party.

According to Gallup, an average of 47 percent of Americans now identify themselves as Democrats or said they were independents who lean toward supporting the Democratic Party, compared to 42 percent who identify themselves as Republicans or lean toward that party.

“That re-establishes a Democratic edge in party affiliation after the two parties were essentially tied in 2010 and 2011,” Gallup concludes in its analysis of the public opinion survey data.

Gallup has only been measuring party identification for the past 21 years. Since 1991, the data has consistently shown an advantage for the Democrats. In 2008, after eight years with the unpopular president George W. Bush in the White House, the Democrats held an advantage of 12 points, one of the reasons Mr. Obama won the presidential election that year.

During this snap shot in time, the Republicans only held an advantage for one year, 1991, when President George H.W. Bush enjoyed record-high approval ratings before he went on to defeat in 1992 after his unpopular stance on taxes. The two parties were essentially tied in 1994-1995, 2001-2003 and 2010-2011.

But in 2012, 31 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats and 16 percent of independents said they leaned toward supporting Democratic candidates, while only 28 percent identified themselves as Republicans and 14 percent of independents leaned Republican.

“The new Democratic advantage is mostly due to an increased proportion of Democratic-leaning independents and a decreased proportion of Republican-leaning independents,” Gallup says its numbers show.

But more Americans, 40 percent, still identify themselves as political independents.

“That is particularly notable, given that the usual pattern is for the percentage of Americans identifying as independents to decline in a presidential election year,” Gallup says. “In each of the last four presidential election years, dating back to 1996, the percentage of independents was lower than in the year prior to the election.”

While Gallup does not mention it, President Obama’s race clearly has a lot to do with this, especially in the American South. As the first African-American president, Mr. Obama is still not popular in this region of the country, and his policy positions or success in office clearly have very little to do with his approval here.

Nevertheless, the increase in political independents has led to a reduction in Democratic and Republican identifiers over the years, Gallup’s numbers show, with the percentage of core Democrats and Republicans currently in the lower range for the past 25 years.

“In fact, 2012 marked the sixth consecutive year that less than 30 percent of Americans identified as Republicans,” Gallup points out. “This includes 2010, when Republicans made huge gains in the midterm congressional elections.”

Gallup’s Implications

“The year 2012 saw President Obama re-elected to office and saw Democrats regain an advantage in party affiliation among the American public. But that bit of good news for the Democrats is tempered by the fact that a record number of Americans continue to claim political independence, at least when initially asked to say which party they support,” Gallup concludes. “The rise in independence is perhaps not surprising, given the low esteem in which Americans hold the federal government and the political parties. But with most Americans willing to at least express a leaning to either party, it does suggest the potential for the parties to gain more solid adherents in the future.”

Analysis

In charting a centrist, pro-business course in his first four years as president and during the presidential election race of 2012, and in refusing to go back and spend time prosecuting the crimes of Bush administration officials such as Karl Rove, President Obama gambled that by taking a moderate stance he could win back mainstream, middle class Americans for the Democratic Party. While he has been stymied on just about every policy front by radical, right-leaning Republicans in the House of Representatives, he has stayed the course. It appears from the public opinion data that this strategy is beginning to pay off.

As normal, working people see that Republican rhetoric about Obama being a “socialist” is false, and as his policies on the domestic economic front and in the arena of foreign policy are shown to be working, albeit too slowly for some, more people are coming around to his point of view. If he can continue to hold this course in a second term, if the economy continues to slowly improve and the threat of terrorism continues to recede, this should pay off for the country and the Democratic Party over time.

If, on the other hand, the president gets dragged into a protracted debate about gun control or illegal immigration without making any progress on the policy front, the numbers could still shift back in the opposite direction. This is the gamble now underway by the leadership among House Republicans. They apparently continue to think they can stand up to the president and keep the country embroiled in a constant wrangle over the deficit and taxes and distract the country from making real progress on health care and the environment, for example, while ignoring core, basic economic principles that show it takes taxes and government spending to create jobs in the wake of a recession.

The future of the country may well depend on whether the president can win this argument with enough of the people to bring about more change in the makeup of the House in the midterm elections of 2014. The future of the planet may depend on victories on these fronts so that we can all turn our attention to the 1,000 pound elephant in the room: Climate change due to human induced global warming.

In the long run, this is a far bigger problem than gun violence or illegal immigration, the two issues that now top the national political agenda due to recent news events. A true debate on the role of the United States in creating the global warming problem also has the most potential to not only benefit the environment but the economy as well. Moving the national economic system in the direction of favoring incentives to produce alternative fuels holds the most potential benefits for creating high paying jobs and preventing wars and economic recessions in the future. The sooner we all realize this and get on with it the better off we will be as a country.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted January-December, 2012, with a random sample of 20,800 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It’s been an interesting ride to say the least, like an experimental roller coaster in a new kind of theme park, maybe. But the ground has shifted and it’s time to move on down the MoJo road.

We are launching a brand new news Website under a new name from Washington, D.C. called the New American Journal. You might want to Bookmark that page or subscribe to the new RSS feed now.

This archive will remain up for awhile longer, but most of the action will move to the new site over the next few weeks and months as I make another transition out of my home town of Birmingham, Alabama to a more mobile setup in a Roadtrek camper van that will remain on the move from Washington, D.C. and the mountains of Virginia to the Gulf Coast.

In the spring of 2005, after moving back to Birmingham from Washington, D.C. to be there for my then-79-year-old mother -- who had no business being alone anymore for health and safety reasons -- I covered my last story for The New York Times: The trial of Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth.

But after it became clear that the new management at the Times was marching to the right for economic reasons after the Jayson Blair scandal, and after “the people” re-elected George W. Bush for a second term as president — or perhaps the Republican techie cabal out of Chattanooga stole the election in Ohio, depending on who you believe — I became convinced that a new kind of press was needed in America for democracy to have a chance of survival.

Blogging software was just emerging then as an alternative way to publish on the Web — and as an alternative for readers to the mainstream, corporate news media in the U.S. and around the world.

I studied up on what was out there, then found a programmer in Homewood who was running a server out of a little computer shop, and started chasing the headlines on a new domain, LocustFork.Net. The idea was to practice the kind of watchdog journalism that helped fight and stop a dam on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It started out as a simple html news page, but we soon added a blog archive interface where original stories, columns, photos and videos could easily be published on the Web and archived by date, tag, category and keywords.

I made one more trip to Washington, D.C. in March to do some work for States News Service and The Hollywood Reporter, and while there, launched a new editorial opinion column from a kitchen in Silver Spring, Maryland called Under the Microscope.

Before I knew it or wanted to admit it, however, I found myself back in Birmingham hunkering down to see what would happen in Bush’s second term. It was a stressful time for the world as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still raged, and it was a stressful time for the country as we woke up every day wondering what fool hardy thing Bush and Cheney would do next. So yes, it was also a stressful time for me as well.

I left my native Birmingham in 1981 for college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and only rarely looked back. I did move back to Southside for a brief period in the late 1980s to open a book store, newsstand and coffee bar and launch a free-lance journalism career after becoming disillusioned with the state of newspapers in my home state. But I left again in 1989 for Gulf Shores to get back into the news business full time.

Then in 1993, I moved back to Tuscaloosa to work on a Masters degree and then got out of Alabama for a good long time, my journey taking me to teach in Georgia, Tennessee and then New Orleans. After having a heck of a run as a free-lance journalist from there, in 2004 I made the big move to D.C.

This new kind of news Website was discovered and followed by people all over the country who were appalled at the politicization of the legal system in America.

I continued to work on building the economy for this new Web Press and started getting enough traffic to actually receive pay checks from Google ads and then Blog ads. People began to send in donations in lieu of a subscription price through PayPal.

By the time of president Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, and then when the BP oil spill hit in the spring of 2010, thousands of people — even in Alabama — were getting online and starting to follow the news on Facebook and then Twitter. We ramped up the readership and the funding to pay for the journalism to a whole new level with the help of a few trial lawyers, labor unions and environmental groups.

By the time President Obama was reelected in 2012, we had completed a redesign that finally merged the news and blog functions into one interface. Our monthly readership hit 3.2 million in October, in part because I was about the only public opinion analyst in the country willing to predict that Obama would walk away with that election in a landslide. Pretty much everybody else, including AP, the Washington Post, all the talking head pundits on TeeVee and even the New York Times kept saying that the election was going to be “too close to call.” I knew better.

As the weeks and months went by, however, and my now 87-year-old mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, I knew it was about time to start planning a new transition for my family and for my future as a Web publisher and journalist.

Ever since I made that first move to Washington in 2004, I have known deep down that the real action in American politics and journalism takes place in the nation’s capital city. It is hard to make a career or a difference out of just focusing on what happens in state capitals like Montgomery or Baton Rouge. The big action and the big news happens in Washington, no matter what they try to tell you in Alabama’s capital city, where they still insist on bucking the fedral govmt every chance they get.

What the federal government does is just far more important than what happens in the states. Besides, the people and the politicians in states — especially Old South states like Alabama — remain far behind the times when it comes to public opinion, forming public policy and keeping up with the news online. Everybody in New York, D.C. and on the West Coast long ago moved on past reading print newspapers and getting all their news from the Boob Tube.

I mean I stopped reading newspapers in print in 1995 and have since sworn off most news coverage on television, national and local. It is all a money-making sensational game for national news outlets, where the partisan divide so dominates the discussion that we will never move past it as a country until so many people stop watching it that they have to change their ways. CNN is already considering converting itself into a cheap reality show. If that is what you think we need feel free to change the channel.

On the local level, the softball local, local, local philosophy on the news will never generate enough traffic to form a full economy of scale, with the possible exception of Newhouse news outlets like al.com, where the resources of the old newspaper and television news empires still provide the budget to create a virtual monopoly on what people consider to be news. Many, many people are now seeing that as a bad thing and have turned to alternative news outlets like this one for a more informed perspective on what goes on in the world.

But a huge swath of the mass audience will continue to depend on broadcast news outlets to read the news generated by print outlets to them on television for the foreseeable future. High Definition television is a powerful medium of communication and is so addictive with the all the entertainment options for sedentary viewers to sit in their recliners and soak it all up with their eyes, without have to exert themselves to do anything but change the channel now and then.

Those who are turning to the Web are a more educated, higher-end demographic audience who are burned out on the old news they get late from newspapers and the passive nature of television. They want to be more engaged in the entertainment and the news process. They make comments and share headline links on Facebook and Twitter, and they are more apt to be politically involved and donate to worthy causes and do more than just show up on election day to vote for their same old party hacks.

These are the people who we are interested in reaching. They are the ones who will change the world for the better. If you have read this far, that means you.

I truly and sincerely appreciate all the support we’ve received from readers all over the state and the country over the past few years. I hope you will continue to follow us on this journey into a brave new world.

Please continue to follow and support our efforts as we create the next new evolution in this new, new, watchdog journalism, what I like to call the alternative, independent Web Press. We really are creating something entirely new here. The technology inevitably changes the way we report and write.

See you down the road from the New American Journal. Don’t forget to like, comment, share -- and maybe even make a donation when you can. Reader contributions are still going to be critical even as we seek out new national sponsors to truly build the economy for this new journalism, to sustain this critical work into what I hope will be a bright, successful future for American democracy.

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